Always Share Your Apocalypse
by EleanorRigbee
Summary: Ben wasn’t the only one who heard voices...[Alec, ghosts, and sanity. Or rather, the lack of it]


**Disclaimer: Don't own Dark Angel or any of the characters**.

**A/N**: I love Alec. I love Ben. I'm sure this idea has been toyed around with plenty. Read, enjoy, let me know what you think.

-

Ben wasn't the only one who heard voices.

Though in all fairness, none of Alec's voices are asking for teeth.

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The first time 494—Alec, he thinks now, he can call himself Alec, they're his memories—was sent to Phy-Opts, was in '09.

They made him stand in the middle of a white room while men in lab coats drew blood and asked questions (_Yes, Sir. No, Sir. Duty. Loyalty. Mission_.) and he said everything that had ever been programmed into his head. Then they strapped him to a chair and it didn't matter how many times he yelled the right answers, they wouldn't stop asking. He couldn't stop screaming.

-

It's not that he's a bucket of crazy. Okay, so he's not entirely sane, but that's beside the point. The point is that there's not a voice everyday, or even most of the time.

It's that sometimes, vague and sporadic sometimes, he hears people that just aren't there—aren't real—and he can't ignore them. It's like white noise in the foreground, or eavesdropping on a conversation taking place inside your head. It's not like Alec pays attention. Not really. He just pays enough attention to discern the differences between the sometimes. Enough to know that sometimes it's Manticore (the doctors, the COs, the soldiers, the big hanchos he never even spoke to one on one). And sometimes it's Rachel (or whatever figment of Rachel remained imbedded in his memory long enough to go sour), and other times still it's none of the above. Other times it's a different voice, younger and frightened—defeated, maybe—and maybe it's him, maybe it's 494 (and it's not till later, until after Max confesses her sin and her heartache and tells him about him, about Ben who went for broke and stole his victims' teeth, does Alec think that maybe the third voice is Ben. What? It's not like he's pretending he's not crazy).

-

The second time Alec was sent to Phy-Opts, he was nineteen and fighting. His silence was rewarded with punches and they broke four ribs and three of his fingers before they stopped. And when he was still silent—nothing but the worried rush and strangled moan of _Rachel_, regret and mourning poured openly in one word—they strapped his broken body to a chair and tried to burn her out of his memory.

And it was in the silence that followed, in the cold of isolation and grief, his memories singed and stinging, that he heard her. Heard her whisper, the quiet murmur of words lost dark of the pool house or over the rhythm of ivory keys and tried to find her. But his body was too hurt to move, his throat too raw to make any further sound, he couldn't reply, couldn't search for her. But she kept whispering, kept talking through the silence, words he couldn't understand poring from some phantom mouth.

Then the men in white coats came back for him and scared her away.

-

It's never Max in his head.

Sometimes he wants to tell her, wants to say that a dead girl and their makers won out on a conscience level; and that she, the almighty Mother Theresa of the Freak Nation, isn't the little voice in his ear talking him through the rough times. But knowing Max she'd just turn that on him. Knowing Max, she'd just make with some psycho babble about how much it all goes to show his dimension of _sick&wrong_.

Because, yeah, Max has to ruin everything for him.

-

The last time 494 was sent to Phy-Opts was nine months before Manticore burned to the ground. They made him stand in the middle a white room, ramrod straight—panic coiling into knots along his synapses—while men in white coats drew blood and checked pupil dilation and asked him questions. _Yes, Sir. No, Sir_. And when he said the soldier's creed of duty, loyalty, mission; they strapped him to a chair and showed him a picture of a woman in blue while they sent fire through his every nerve.

And there was the din of white noise in the foreground, drowning out his screams. Not Rachel, not the blur of commanding voices that roared in his ears when he made a kill, but someone small and breaking, someone who assured in a tumbling voice that he wasn't going to be leaving this time.

-

It's not that he's crazy. No, that's not true. It's entirely that he's crazy. That's the whole point, that's the moral and the meaning and the not-so-subtle subliminal message.

It's just that he's not _crazy_ crazy.

It's that it's _not_ that anyone is instructing him to light fires or, you know (the obvious one), pull teeth. There's no celestial being giving him a mission. He's not trying to save the world. He's not even trying to save himself. But the voices exist, there, in his head, talking even when he doesn't want them to. There's the white rush of Manticore that makes 494 scuttle beneath his too thin skin, the murmur of Rachel that echoes like tuned piano wire, the whisper of a nameless voice he sometimes calls Ben but never calls Alec (because Alec is his name, his name, only his name) telling him he's going to die.

It's clean cut, his insanity. And that has to count for something. Right?

-

**End **


End file.
